Having a good posture while presenting is very important. It shows that you are well-versed with what you’re conveying to your audience, you are engaged, interested with what’s going on and and alert about the things happening around you while you speak.

Below are tips you can use to make sure that the next time you speak in front of an audience, you will already have the proper posture:

#1 Consult a Wall

Stand a against a wall to know what it feels like to have proper posture.

#2 Distribute Weight Evenly on Your Foot

SThis way, you won’t be experiencing any back aches and other posture problems.

#3 Fill Your Belly

Proper breathing must be practiced.

#4 The Right Shoes for the Job

Avoid footwear that alter your natural stance.

#5 Take a Picture

Look at photos of you while presenting and see how your posture is like.

#6 Shoulder Roll

By rolling your shoulders up and backwards, you will help yourself practice proper posturing.

Do you have an existing PowerPoint presentation that you want to change in terms of its design, particularly its Slide Master design? Well, you can actually apply a Slide Master design to an existing presentation.

You just do these two steps first:

Choose View tab, Slide Master.

In the left-hand pane, scroll up to the first, larger thumbnail.

There’s a wrong way of doing this and a better way of applying a Slide Master to a presentation. It is basically about creating a theme file so you can then easily apply your design and not fret about copying over your original presentation.

Ellen Finkelstein recently had an interesting conversation with Lisa B. Marshall where she talked about PowerPoint and presentations. In particular, they talked about presentation designs, trends and questions people would usually ask her like:

– how to not put everything on a slide– where to get good, free images– how to not read your slides– techniques on how to engage the audience especially during webinars– how to use feedback to move your presentations forward– the difference between live presentations and online presentations

Lisa B. Marshall also mentioned one of Ellen’s e-books called The Lost Art of Persuasion. Here, she further probed into the 3 mistakes most presenters make when trying to persuade an audience.

During the course of the conversation, a compare and contrast was also made between the use of Tell n’ Show instead of Show n’ Tell and what that means. Furthermore, a distinction was made between the use of photos and ClipArt.

Before the talk ended, a very important question was asked by Lisa: When is it good not to be using PowerPoint to which Ellen gave a very insightful answer.

If you’re a speaker or a presenter, I encourage you to listen to Ellen’s Smart Talk podcast. Here’s the link: http://t.co/OzDRFvbtYp

To those using PowerPoint slides in their presentation, do you know how to precisely specify the position of an image or object? Maybe you’d say that it is easy because usually, it is. But it is only easy when you know where to find the settings.

Most of the time, PowerPoint users would want to specify the position of an image so that images on adjacent slides would be in the same place and it won’t look like you are jumping from slide to slide. There will be uniformity in the slides and the entire presentation would look flawless.

There are two usual solutions on how to do this:

1. Copy and Paste

2. Use a Ruler

However, there is a third and best solution for this which is to:

3. Specify the Exact Position

By doing so, you can now match the exact positions of two objects or easily set the position of 1 object.

For presenters who use PowerPoint and would like to keep track of their time, it’s not enough that there is a clock on the wall or that he or she is wearing a watch. What if the clock is behind you as the presenter or what if it gets too distracting to be looking at your watch every few minutes? This won’t look good in front of your audience at all. It would seem like you’re rushing through your presentation.